Westgarth Forster

Westgarth Forster (1772, Garrigill - 1835, Garrigill) was a geologist, mineralogist, and mining engineer.^[1] He was the son of a mining engineer, and was born in Garrigill, Cumbria.^[2] He became a mining agent on Alston Moor an area in the Pennines noted for its extensive lead mines,^[3] but died penniless in 1835.

Author

He is known principally as the author of a book called A Treatise on a Section of the Strata from Newcastle-upon-Tyne to the Mountain of Cross Fell in Cumberland. The first edition (1809) is very rare; his work is known mainly from the second edition (1821).^[1] A third edition was published in 1883, which was, however, much revised and modified by its editor, the Rev. W. Nall.^[4]

The work describes the local strata in the north-east in its vertical sequence as discovered during mining operations. It also discusses the ways of prospecting for ore and developing mineral veins, especially the method of hushing from dams built high on the hillsides. There are numerous remains of such dams in many British ore-fields, especially in the northern Pennines. The method survives in modern gold-fields in Africa.

He was the first to recognise cyclic sedimentation in Carboniferous rocks, and he produced complex stratigraphic columns.^[1]

Tribute

A tribute to Forster, penned by Nall, appeared in the third edition:

Though nearly half a century has elapsed since the grave closed over Westgarth Forster's remains, his name still continues a household word amongst the people of Alston Moor; he lives in their minds as a clever, though somewhat eccentric man, different in many respects from the ordinary run of men. But it is not only among the Alstonians that his name lives; it is frequently heard in Weardale and Allendale. Local mining agents and local geologists are familiar with it; mining agents and geologists, who have a mining reputation which is more than local, still continue to quote him as an authority on mining and geological questions. His "Section of the Strata" is still the standard work on the geology of the two northern counties. It was never more highly prized by miners than it is now. Though the book was written when the science of geology was in its initial stage; when even people of education recognised no distinction between one kind of rock and another; when such terms as stratified and unstratified, aqueous and igneous, seldom appeared in print, and were scarcely ever heard; when the great works of Buckland, De la Beche, Phillips, Lyell, Murchison, Sedgwick, and other geologists had not yet appeared, the classification of the strata which it contains, is the one still in use. Forster rendered valuable services to the sciences of mining and geology, and for that service, if for no other reason, his name will be remembered for a long time to come. The letters and extracts quoted in this memoir show how upright and honorable he was in his dealings.

Notes

1. Biographies of Geologists in George Willard White, Claude C. Albritton, (1978), Essays on history of geology, page 289. Ayer Publishing
2. Robert T. Clough, (1980), The Lead Smelting Mills of the Yorkshire Dales and Northern Pennines, page 316
3. Christopher John Hunt, (1970), The lead miners of the Northern Pennines: in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, page 231
4. Book Review of Forster's Strata of the North of England in Nature 30, 3-3 (1 May 1884)